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I experienced one of the most valuable lessons in the late 90s when I ran my first business, Quill Publishing. At Quill we had achieved the majority of our business and financial goals and had taken great strides to carve a nice niche for ourselves. Everything seemed to go exactly how I had envisioned and hoped.
Until one day…
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If you have been anywhere in the blogsophere in the few days, you must have noticed that there is a lot of talk around blogrush, the new service that promises bloggers to drive a flood of targeted traffic to your site. The first email I got about this service was Friday night. Since then, I must have received close to 10 emails from friends who were asking about it. On a hunch, I checked out the number of links the site had Friday night. Yahoo told me that there were 340 links to it mentions of it. When I checked the number of links mentions on Monday afternoon, the count had gone up to 2,400 links mentions:
On Tuesday they reached a whopping 44,000 links mentions! As of writing this post, Yahoo is reporting 62,300 links mentions.
62,300 links in three days is amazing. As a metter of fact, the huge demand for the services caused some technical difficulties.
I expect we will hear a lot more about the service before things calm down. John Reese the founder of blogrush successfully designed his marketing campaign to spread virally. I compared some of the elements I outlined to creating a viral campaign to what John did.
Obviously John had something that created a lot of discussion and excitement amongst bloggers. Getting more traffic to a new blog is one of the main problems bloggers struggle with when they start a new blog. Provide a good solution or at least claim to provide one and bloggers will talk. The speed the campaign picked in the first two days is also a good indicator on how big the problem is for bloggers. When creating a viral campaign, most of the time is invested in coming up with the initial idea.
You have to agree with me that the idea of blogrush is fairly simple. There is nothing creative about it. It is easy to explain. We do not necessarily have to come up with something too creative for a viral campaign. We need to find a problem or a need that people face every day and provide a solution to it.
This step was probably one of the easiest steps in the blogrush campaign. The product is designed for talkers. From what I gathered based on the emails I received, John emailed few of the big name bloggers about the product. These authority bloggers did the initial talking, and their readers did the rest of the job. When you sign up for the blogrush services the first time, it asks you to input the names and email addresses of your friends who might be interested in the service.
I hesitated in the past in emailing other bloggers about new materials we publish or blogs that might be interesting to their readership. To be honest, I did not want anyone to think I am spamming them. I have learned since that if you have something relevant and of value, bloggers do not mind hearing about it.
Good product or good services are essential elements for the success of a viral campaign. You can succeed in all of the above elements but your product must carry you the rest of the way. Creating a viral campaign for a poor product most likely will backfire. That is the main area where blogrush will fall short. In order for blogrush to be successful, the service has to be automated. You subscribe to it, you get some javascript code to place in your blog and that is it. From blogrush perspective, this is a model that can easily scale up. However, this model does not provide real way to review the blogs subscribed to the service. Subscribers to blogrush have no way to ensure that blogs appearing on the rush widget are good quality blogs. Here is a good example:
Nusuni is a blog about seo and blogging news. Links on the blogrush widget included on it are to
None of these really relates to the topics discussed on nusuni. I clicked on one them just to see the quality of the blogs linked via blogrush. Not too impressive.
We spend a lot of time choosing the blogs we link to. As a matter of fact, I can spend close to an hour looking for good blogs to link for each of my posts. Quality of the links matter a lot. This is where blogrush falls short.
Blogrush obviously provided a solution many bloggers need. Others will copy it. Since the service is not at the level where many bloggers will accept it, I think this even provides a greater chance for other services that provide something very similar but with more quality control mechanisms.
So, at the end I give the viral campaign ran by blogrush two thumbs up but the service itself gets a thumbs down!
Do you think many bloggers will continue to use the widget? Did you install the widget on your site? What do you think of the service?
Update #1 : Ben from blogging experiment reported today on his statistics after using blogrush for three of days. His blog titles had a total of 595 impressions with 1 click to the blog.
Update #2: Problogger is reporting that his blogrush click through rate is around %1 0.05%. There also seems to be some problems with the way credits are calculated in the system
Update #3: well, it seems that i was using the wrong command to show the number of links. The command I was using shows the actual number of times the words “blogrush” was mentioned in text format with or without a link. Of course it is still impressive that blogrush was actually mentioned almost 63,000 thousand but these are not actual links.
I was listening to Talk of the Nation on NPR last week week. If you do not follow national politics, you would not consider the topic of that episode interesting. Neal Conan was interviewing Matt Bai, the author of “The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics.” Matt argues that democrats’ policy of presenting a unified front is affecting their ability to create new ideas that influence ideology and culture. The interesting part of the program was when a professor of history dialed into the show and was the first to comment. He started by saying that he was shocked why none of the democratic candidates went to the LDC and instead they chose to go the some blogger convention. The professor continued to ask, “Where did these stupid bloggers come from.” Unfortunately the link on NPR’s site to the recording of this show is not working.
So here are some thoughts:
Blogging is popular. Or is it? With over 60 million blogs online in May, blogging is popular. Yet there are many people who still do not have a clue about it. I wonder how much of the population actually reads blogs regularly. So I conducted a quick informal survey. I asked the client team members what blogs they read regularly. Of a team of 20 engineers, only one of them read any blogs. But this doesn’t mean blogging isn’t popular and hasn’t caught on.
Bloggers are affecting national debate: Yes politicians are finally listening and it is our turn to do some of the talking. I am cynical by nature so I wonder how much of this will continue after the elections. Of course it does not stop with politics. Large companies are acting much faster to resolve customer complaints when bloggers write about them. Yes, I finally feel empowered.
What are you reading? This blog is about marketing. Most of the blogs I read are business blogs in nature. If bloggers who write about politics are causing such a stir, I decided that I should expand my horizons and add different types of blogs to my reading list.
What do you think?
Khalid is trying his best to encourage comments, but of course, we do need to lay down some ground rules for comments. Yes, the INVESP Blog loves and encourages its readers to leave comments, and that’s why our rules are easy to follow and encourage great insight from our readers:
1. Relevant links: FOR SURE! If you’d like to leave relevant links within your comment, you’re more than welcome to. It’s actually very encouraged. The keyword is “relevant” ;).
2. Signatures: Signatures are fine as long as the comment is relevant. So if you leave: Great Job! Or Great post! And a linkable signature, you’re comment will be most likely be deleted. However, a meaningful comment and a signature afterwards is okay and encouraged!
3. Irrelevant links gotta go: Now on the other hand, if you leave links that have nothing to do with the content of the blog, than we will most likely be deleting that comment.
4. Spam Will Be Deleted: Any comment that feels “spammy” and has no relevance to the post will be deleted.
5. Don’t be afraid: Now, we aren’t establishing policies to make commenting a difficult process. We are however confirming to everyone that some things are just not tolerated and we reserve the right to delete anything deemed inappropriate.
Again, don’t hesitate to comment. Khalid has gone out of his way to show you that he is willing to reward comments and commentators every week! What kind of comment policy to encourage on your blog?
I have about 70 blogs I read regularly. But there are couple that I always start my day reading because frankly their content is unique and refreshing.
Create Business Growth: fresh, different and interesting topics every day!
If you are active on online forums, you must be familiar with Steve [a.k.a. vangogh]
And I think everyone knows Chris Garrett but did you know that he also started authority blogger forum, one of my all time favorite forums for bloggers.
If you want to learn read quality posts about online marketing and advertising, then Muhammad Saleem at Pronet advertising is your man.
We talk a lot about conversion optimization on our blog. One of my favorite blogs on the topic is Lead optimize by Chris Denny who guest blogs with invesp as well.
Blogger’s block is something all writers will suffer from; lack of ideas, creativity, and inspiration. In order to blog, you’ve got to be able to give your readers something valuable while maintaining a laid-back, conversational style. But when you’re stuck and unable to “blog” properly your post may become very boring. So what to do? How can your blog post be the linkbait goldmine you’ve been waiting for?
Well, I have a few tips that may help:
1. READ OTHER BLOGS!! Nothing can help you overcome blogger’s block BETTER than to expose yourself to other blogs. This is the golden key to solve ALL of your blogging dilemmas. It is an inspirational and motivational tool that will help get your creative juices going.
2. Limit your Topics: As a professional blogger, you can’t blog about everything. In order to gain authenticity and credibility, you need to limit your topics. If you have a million topics in mind; it’s no wonder you have blogger’s block. However, if you limit the topics your mind will focus on one thing, and only one thing.
3. Personalize it: When you bring your business and personal experiences to the blog, you can truly attract more of an audience. Why? Because your blog is more authentic and unique. So when you’re stuck, consider a business incident that has occurred and try to blog about that.
4. Bullets and Lists: You can take a seemingly boring post and add some spice to it by listing the points in your blog: the “top ten” or “5 tips for.” People LOVE lists because they are organized, straight to the point, and very simple to understand.
When you blog, your need to consider what interests and attracts your reader; and keep in mind that this is a web-reader so there are special rules that apply.
5. Headlines: A great headline is the doorway to attract readers to your blog. It isn’t everything, but it can have an impact on how many people actually begin to consider looking at your blog. One method that is commonly used by bloggers is to include a celebrity’s name and how they taught you “the topic.” For example: “How George Bush taught me to write a better blog.” So how can this help you overcome blogger’s block? Simple; start with the headline and work your way down.
As I was going through my Google Reader blog subscriptions, I noticed that I enjoy reading the blogs that are conversational much more than those that have no personal or conversational touch. I started to read back my own blogs that I’ve written to look at my own writing style and I realized that I could be doing much better to include readers in the blog “conversation.”
After doing some research and reading a lot more blogs these are some steps I’ve noticed that differentiated the more interesting conversational blogs from the rest:
A couple of days ago as I was having lunch with some of my old work friends at Panera, one of them mentioned that she recently read an article I had written for my college newspaper. I was shocked to say the least, because I never had considered that anyone that did not attend the university, especially a much older individual, would be interested in reading our college paper. It got me thinking that whenever I write a blog or any document I am always keeping in mind a group of readers that I’m targeting in my writing, however it’s important to keep other readers in mind. It’s crazy to think that your blog audience can potentially expand to over 6 billion people!
Obviously not all 6 billion world citizens are going to read your work! But even if we limit our audience to the United States there are still some techniques that can be followed to help improve our ability to write effectively for multiple audiences. When researching on this topic I found that Stanford University and The Poynter Institute did a study in 2000 on how people read the news on the web. They tracked eye movements and came to the conclusion that on an initial visit to any website, people paid much more attention to text on that page than graphics. After going through this study and researching a little deeper I’ve come up with the following tips to help improve effectively writing for multiple audiences:
Some writers love the idea of creating a “cult” for themselves. They’ve even gone as far as creating traits that all “members of the writing cult” share. I thought it was really funny, so I’ve compiled a list of the traits that writers should have according to ordinary Joe Shmoe writers and bloggers, and my rebuttal to each:
Rebuttal: Yes, writers can express creatively; but what may seem like a creative expression to someone could be nonsense to another. My point is this is vague and could be applied to anyone, writer or not.
Rebuttal: Not necessarily. Actually, I’ve encountered many writers that do not know to “think outside the box.” Writers are individuals that vary because of experiences they’ve encountered in life. So yes, a writer that has been exposed to situations that force them to “problem-solve” will be “excellent problem-solvers”. But if not; they most likely have not developed the skills to starting viewing things from a separate angle. So again, determining that all writers should possess this trait is nonsense.
Rebuttal: Writer or not, everyone has a unique perspective when looking and considering different issues. So why is this a specific trait to writers or creative people?
Rebuttal: I think this is something that any successful person should possess, I don’t know why it is specifically dubbed a trait for writers!!
Rebuttal: What kind of risks? Writing risks? I don’t even think you can determine that! I mean writers, like all people, come in various shapes and sizes. Some are risk takers, but many like to stay in their comfort zones. Are the risk takers better writers? I think not.
Rebuttal: Open-mindedness? Actually, many successful writers aren’t open-minded AT ALL!! That’s what makes their writing so appealing! They are so polarizing that it completely attracts a specific reader of their column, book, blog, etc.
Rebuttal: Actually, when you look at the rates that some of these writers are charging you realize how much they are truly in it for the money! In the end everybody loves the cash. Now, that doesn’t mean that writers do not love what they do. But if they aren’t getting paid, trust me, they aren’t loving it!
The conclusion is that there are no traits that can truly define writers into a single group. We can try, but many great writers have come and gone; and each writer had their own great traits and lived by their own rules.
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